Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Splitting Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon into 40 smaller tech companies would result in larger tech companies from elsewhere - mostly China - eating American tech industry's lunch on the world stage.

Large companies have massive resources which are a competitive advantage. Having these titanic companies headquartered in the US, beholden to American laws, employing Americans, being a symbol of American prowess abroad and listed on American stock exchanges is in American interests on multiple tangible & intangible levels; including allowing American engineers to command ridiculous salaries and granting the government a lot of soft-power.

The recent sanctions on Russia (and previously Huawei/ZTE) shows howuch that soft-power is worth

You are talking about power. I am talking about security. They are related, but different.

There will be security implications when Americans are hypothetically mostly using Chinese tech (Weibo, Didi, Baidu), should it leapfrog a kneecapped US tech industry - unless the US also bans Chinese tech - which would isolate the US and make it less competitive while ceding tech leadership in the rest of the world.

Also, all the botnet-, APT-, ransomware and CSAM investigation & disruption ops would be hampered when the #1 desktop operating system, #1 & #2 phone OS authors, #1 network equipment manufacturer,#1 social network and top 3 cloud providers are no longer under your legal jurisdiction

Can't the US just cap market share of any company foreign or domestic?

How might that be implemented?

Sounds like we're about to create The Freedom Firewall to protect us from global competition.

Biggest players in significant industries get measured periodically. Those who cross some threshold of those markets get warned. Then if they exceed some higher threshold must be broken up or reduce their share.

In that case, perhaps it is best to merge the top 5-10 tech companies into a single tech behemoth, with no potential domestic competition, making it even more formidable on the world stage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com